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"Was" a she? So the person was trans-gender and trying to fake their death to live as the opposite sex. It's all becoming so clear now. Ladies, beware of effeminate short French men with a funny accent.

BTW, what would you guys suggest to wean non-technical friends off FB chat,

I don't know... we've gone backwards. We started out with competing and non-compatible IM clients - AIM being the biggest. For a while we were trending toward a bunch of competing but compatible IM clients. Then everyone abandoned IM for SMS. Now they are abandoning SMS for a bunch of competing non-compatible IM clients... just on the phone this time.

I currently have WhatsApp installed for a single friend who insists on using it. It's pretty good - give that one a shot. Sometimes people invite me to a Google Hangout - and that also lets you talk or video chat for free. Viber is another one that works pretty well and gives you free calling. The desktop version does video. I have exactly one friend on that.

The worst is that they DO know, and yet still wrote a whole paper on it. They are concatenating strings in Java and Python - which is slow. Surprise, surprise, it is faster to write strings to a pre-allocated buffer, in this case the disk cache. That is the whole paper.

Germany is really struggling with exactly the problem you dismiss. It is relatively simple to take one isolated pocket and only draw from the grid when the batteries start to run low. If you can give the utility an hour's notice, they can start spooling up generators. Give them notice again when you are going to disconnect and they can orderly shut generation down.

Requiring the smooth two-way transfer of power is a more complicated problem to solve, even if it eliminates the bank of batteries. It also requires that the entire system be set up to handle distributed generation, whereas the Musk solution makes no such demand. In practical terms, this might make solar more viable in places where it is politically difficult to make infrastructure changes.